


Kill Team Free Will

by Andsoshewrites



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angelic Grace (Supernatural), Gen, Heaven, Hell, Kill Bill - Freeform, Killing, Lucifer's Cage (Supernatural), M/M, Murder, Other, Post-Lucifer's Cage (Supernatural), Post-Season/Series 05, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, Post-Season/Series 06, Revenge, Souls, if you're looking for destiel they're more than passingly mentioned but like. they die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:14:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28060743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andsoshewrites/pseuds/Andsoshewrites
Summary: Former harbingers of the Apocalypse, Adam Milligan and the archangel Michael, are freed by chance from the Cage after 10 years of their self-proclaimed families wasting every opportunity to save them. Fueled by an insatiable desire for revenge, they vow to destroy everyone who took part in the prolonging of their stay in hell.Or: a Midam retelling of Kill Bill.(~~~A MATCH MADE IN HELL!~~~)
Relationships: Adam Milligan & Kate Milligan, Castiel/Dean Winchester, Michael & Adam Milligan & Kate Milligan, Michael & Kate Milligan, Michael/Adam Milligan
Comments: 7
Kudos: 22





	1. Volume 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, everyone! Welcome to Kill Team Free Will, like the title and summary allude, a retelling of the 2003 and 2004 movies Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2. It is not an exact or even, I would say, all that close adaptation of the story, but it for sure has the spirit of Kill Bill. Like the films, KTFW also divides itself into volumes (with chapters within each volume [each chapter has a song lyric title—songs will be in the end notes]): volume 2 will be out in one week. If you’re here after that point, congrats, this is a finished fic!
> 
> Neither Kill Bill is ‘required viewing,’ so to speak, for this fic. If you’re here to see Midam beat the shit out of and/or slaughter the Winchesters and co, this fic is for you regardless. This fic also diverges from canon around season 5/6 (with a few tweaks within that)—the implication is that everything is just chill in the life of the Winchesters after that point.
> 
> I have done my best to tag this fic appropriately within AO3’s system, but given the violent nature of Kill Bill and thereby KTFW, I’ve also included in the following lines a more in-depth content warning—spoilers apply—for certain sections of volume 1. Volume 2 will have a similar list. If you think anything should be added, please let me know.
> 
> This was so much fun to write and I know something (meaning, Midam going after Team Free Will) a lot of people are eager to explore. Enjoy!
> 
> Tons and tons of thanks as well to my beta reader, fxa on tumblr <3.
> 
> Content Warnings Volume 1:  
> • Mention of rape (not with regards to any character) (chapter 2, paragraph 1)  
> • Short scene where a minor OC threatens to kill themselves (chapter 2, paragraph 3)  
> • Brief but vivid description of something that is/is akin to domestic violence (chapter 3, paragraph 3)  
> • Dismemberment of an unearthly fashion (chapter 3, section 2, paragraph 4 and 5)  
> • Semi-graphically described eye injury (chapter 3, section 2, paragraph 10)

_Had Adam seen Castiel’s true form just an Earth year earlier, he would have been amazed._

_“Sam! I’m here to raise you!”_

_“Good luck getting him to say anything back, Castiel! Little Sammy’s all fucked in the head! Too much torture does that to a vessel, whoulda thought?”_

_“He’s not…even gonna_ say _anything to me?”_

_“Castiel! You will take Adam Milligan as well or I will make it my mission once I’m free to ensure one more angel knows the horrors of this Cage! I would say it’s an order, but we all know how well you respond to those.”_

_“Castiel, you_ will not _take my vessel.”_

_There is a horrific, simultaneous rip and scream._

**_KILL TEAM FREE WILL: VOL. 1_ **

**CHAPTER 1: HORSES MADE OF STICKS**

It’s an accident, really.

Some grand fuck up in the grand scheme of things amounts to the breaking of the second seal number 66, unbeknownst to the hunters who pulled the thing off as well as every other human on Earth—save for one Dean Winchester, who is alerted by Castiel suddenly _screaming_ in the Bunker.

When it happens, Adam has conjured up a cockeyed version of a gondola ride for him and Michael—his original memories of such scenes in movies are far from intact. This gondola ride is out on open water, the boat rows itself, the Moon is too close in the sky, and the lighting around the gondola would require city lights that are not there. If Adam or Michael were to pass their hands through the water, it would not be wet or briny; rather, the plunge into the dark, featureless placidity would feel like pollen crushed between one’s fingers, wind that has just a bit of grit in it, aloe drying up on a sunburn. Grace, approximately. The only thing fluid Adam’s touched in 1000 years.

Adam is telling Michael a severely misremembered story about a school field trip, wherein some kid Adam doesn’t really remember but in actuality didn’t like that much gets eaten by bears and dragged by the guts into the woods. Michael is staring at him fondly, listening contentedly, when, in Adam’s mind space, Michael tilts his head and his eyes glow.

“What is it, love?” Adam asks.

Michael is silent for several moments, his eyes still glowing. “Take a look at this, kid,” he says finally, and the off-color gondola scene fades into the reality of the Cage.

It’s open.

Like thick, gritty clots of blood in his throat, he comes to screaming, already raw in the throat and _everywhere_ , and it is all sensation. A buzzing, buzzing, buzzing in his ears, otherworldly, _too big_ , old, loud, older than the human brain remembers even in its vestigial half-memories of evolution, and yet, it is gentle. Goosebumps running up his arms and rubbing against his sleeves remind him of skin and limbs and sensations beyond his head, and realizing he is on his hands and knees, fists clenching dirt and dead leaves, the frequency of the buzz begins to make sense to him, _You’re safe, Adam, you’re safe, Adam, you’re safe._ He closes his mouth, smacks his lips slowly once or twice to get his saliva flowing again, feels grace sweep briefly over his vocal cords to soothe their hurt. Adam. Michael. AdamMichael.

“ _Sorry to scare you_ ,” Adam tells Michael in his mind, meets the tendrils of worry with a shaky embrace. “ _Is there a reason why our eyes are closed?_ ”

“ _The outside is bright for you. It was—it_ is _hurting you_.”

That figures, given the trajectory of Adam’s life so far. “ _So, what’s our next move?_ ”

“ _You need to be acclimated. I would never put you through this pain if we didn’t need to do it._ ”

Adam nods to himself. “Alright,” he says out loud. “We in a shady spot?”

“ _Of course. We’re under some trees. Reach out, and you’ll find one._ ”

“Okay,” Adam says, and he slowly unfurls a balled-up fist and reaches forward. When his palm hits bark he lets out a shout: his brain pulses and jerks with new sensation, and he hadn’t _remembered_ that trees felt like this. At some point, in his mindscape, all of the trees Adam had climbed without fear of falling, reached out to palm to guide his way into hammocks, carved A + M in hearts into had turned smooth, the same lackluster texture every solid thing in Adam’s memories had become. Adam curls his fingers in, lets his nails scrape against the rough, uneven planes. His brain jumps around again, and this time Adam’s arms buckle a bit, his face briefly swiping the ground. Michael’s grace reaches out to wipe away dirt and heal the little scrape on his nose. Adam moves his hand around to the back of the tree and pulls himself up to the base of it. He flips himself around, arms and legs shaking, and plants his back against the tree’s trunk. His jacket mercifully blocks out sensation.

Adam pants a bit with exertion and Michael sends him praise and encouragement.

Once he feels well enough recovered, Adam says to himself, “Crack your eyes open.” And again. “Crack your eyes open.”

Eventually, his eyelids, heavy and twitching with effort, part just enough for light to spill in through the web of his eyelashes; they immediately shut again, Adam sweating and twitching in pain. “Crack your eyes open,” Adam pants out again. It’s several more tries before the stinging is manageable enough for him to keep them cracked. All his brain can interpret is sunlight, not a thing the light is touching.

Adam laughs to himself. “Kind of like looking at you for the first time, sweetheart.”

Michael sends out ripples of amusement. “ _Do I need to be jealous of the Sun now?_ ”

“ _Nah_ ,” Adam says, closer, in their mind, “ _not nearly as sexy_.”

The pure light morphs, gradually, into outlines and shapes and eventually into truer pictures of trees and grass and ground, Adam’s eyes creeping more and more open. With one particular blink, Adam’s eyes open fully, and he rises, slowly, to his feet.

“Is this what this looks like?” he asks in awe. He had remembered, in his mindscape, a particular visual sensation when sunlight passed through the gaps in tree leaves, but his recreations had always been blotchy and patchy, nothing like the delicate, detailed scene he sees before him—not a single point or tear on a single leaf forgotten. He walks, slowly, out of the grove Michael had found for them and into the sunlight. He reaches out and touches one of the trees out in the light, notices how intricate the patterns on the bark are. He feels a tear slip down his cheek as he gazes at the leaves on the ground—they’re so colorful, so crisp, and some of them even have little holes in them from where caterpillars have eaten parts of them.

“They _took this_ from us,” Adam says, his hand on the tree balling into a fist. Michael ripples beneath his skin, powerful, angry, electricity beginning to zip through the air around their body. Adam reaches his fingers out to touch the sparks, reveling in the feeling of the shocks and subsequent swirls of healing grace: kiss after kiss for each of his fingertips. AdamMichael think together, come to an understanding. Adam tosses control back and Michael surges forward in perfect time to catch it.

Michael spreads his wings, fully, reaching far past the edges of the woods, and for the second time in a millennium, flies.

**CHAPTER 2: IT’S LIKE WE KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING OR SOMETHING**

All Michael had had to do was spread tendrils of grace across all the towns they had decided to stretch their wings over, picking the brains of each Joe Schmoe driving to the grocery store, walking their dog, or answering phone calls at work. Their thoughts, mostly, were uninteresting and even less decipherable to him than human thoughts had been leading up to the Apocalypse that wasn’t: Adam couldn’t tell him either what a chip reader, Instagram, or OnlyFans were. Some of them had leads, however, and Michael stored any thoughts of knife fights or shooting ranges or rapists getting the shit expertly kicked out of them as threads to tie back together later and trace to certain people they’d ought to go visit.

One such visit has Adam coming back to their body with the hum of grace still under his fingertips and in his breath, gasping and feeling tingly, loose, a little weak in the knees and mushy in the chest.

Crumpled at their feet is a former expert gunslinger, now a smoking, eyeless corpse. By this point, they’d already left a martial artist and knife expert only unconscious, but Michael had seen, in harnessing this gunslinger’s memories to convert into their body’s skills, a nervous little girl and her mother and one memory in particular from about seven years in the past of this proclaimed ‘peaceful, pacifist’ gunslinger holding one of his prized, polished guns up to his own head, crying and screaming and demanding of the mother to abort her fetus, and Michael had immediately smote him.

Adam grins wide. “ _You are the_ sweetest.”

Michael prickles with irritation and protectiveness inside their body. “ _I can’t stand men who can’t face the consequences of their own sexual activities._ ”

Adam kicks the guy square in the chest so that his body lays flat on the floor then takes his holster, tossing the gun inside of it aside for the moment. He turns to look again at the man’s collection with new eyes: the barrels of metal and triggers mean something to him now, make sense to him now. He grabs some bullets and one gun in particular he thinks will work well for their purposes and sends an impression to Michael, and the gun and ammo vanish under his hands to their implicitly agreed upon base—the little grove in the woods.

The notebook and pen appear in Adam’s hand before he even consciously realizes he wants them. “ _Thank you, sweetheart_ ,” he tells Michael with a loving nudge against his grace. Michael keens in response.

He sits down, back against the trunk of the tree he’d first touched out of the Cage ( _their_ tree, Adam and Michael have taken to calling it, and, yes, they’ve carved their initials into it in a heart) and flips open the notebook. “ _Got any suggestions before we get to Team Free Will?_ ”

“ _I’d say Zachariah for hurting you, but it’s late for that. In fact, I’d say the entire heavenly host for ignoring our confinement, but I wouldn’t want to leave heaven without order, and that isn’t exactly succinct enough for a list._ ”

“ _Sure it is_ ,” Adam says and writes it out.

  1. **THE HEAVENLY HOST**
  2. **CASTIEL**
  3. **BOBBY SINGER**
  4. **SAM WINCHESTER**
  5. **DEAN WINCHESTER**



**CHAPTER 3: ABOMINATION/GOD’S CREATION**

Kate Milligan’s mug of hot chocolate slides from her hands. On Earth, it would shatter and slosh hot liquid onto her feet and ankles, but in her world, it stops mid fall and repositions itself on her granite countertop.

There is a huge, swirling monstrosity of eyes, light, heads, rings, spikes, more than Kate can really process hovering above her home, her roof and walls now gone. She feels herself slipping, suddenly, like she might fall down, and then her head is underwater—

—her sisters dunking it under in a YMCA; shards of ceramic crashing and shattering just left of her head the one time her father had thrown a plate at her, when she’d suggested to him, hobbling through their house on a breathing tube, that he not smoke that cigarette; her oldest sister in the hospital with only a broken ankle after her car had rolled, saying, “Katie, not even god could kill me”; Adam wriggling around on the floor in a blue hand-me-down onesie, learning to crawl; a wobbly toddler Adam smacking his head into the wall when Kate was on the phone about a job interview; nursing night school; night nursing; her foot aching against the gas pedal at 7:20AM, hoping to catch Adam before the bus did; something about a ripping, a pain in her stomach, something about Adam—

An arm—a _human_ arm—wraps around her back to prevent her from falling. Kate blinks and sees the monster again but aside from that, right in front of her face now, _Adam_ , her Adam, and how had she not realized before that Adam hadn’t been there with her this whole time she had been gardening and fixing lavish meals for herself and carving soap and playing Gameboy games and _not working 12-hour shifts?_

“Oh, jeez,” Adam — _her Adam!_ —is saying, _to the monster_ , Kate absently realizes, “somehow, it didn’t occur to me that she might pass out.” But, it doesn’t matter about the monster or the way their very form _pushes_ a little, even now, at Kate’s grasp on her surroundings because _Adam_ is here and the monster, it seems, is here with Adam.

“ _Oh_ , my baby,” Kate says and touches her hands a bit rough to his face and hair, subconsciously trying to check that he’s real.

“ _Mom_ ,” Adam says in return, taking in her presence now that his immediate concern isn’t with her collapsing, smiling wide and wrapping her up in a tight hug. “I missed you so much,” Adam says, sniffling, and Kate cannot understand in that moment how much that sentiment is true or what, exactly, it means for him.

They hug for much longer than any reasonable hug on Earth would last, and once they’re done, Adam steps aside as if to make room for the monster to speak. The monster is still huge, complex, swift, unearthly, but Kate is more prepared for it this time.

Adam, wiping tears from his cheeks, steps past the boundaries of her house and _elbows_ the monster in what might be their side. “Say something to her,” he says.

“Hello, Kate Milligan,” the monster says in a booming voice, then casts some of their many sets of eyes over to Adam as if to say, _Help!_ Kate watches as her son facepalms.

“Mom,” Adam says, “that big lug outside is, uh….” He laughs. “I can’t believe we didn’t rehearse this, Michael!”

“Who looks stupid now?” the monster—Michael—asks, as if Adam had said something of the sort earlier. Kate watches as Michael shoots _wisps of himself_ like liquid arrows through Adam’s body. She feels alarm at the sight, but Adam just looks even happier. He comes over to hug her again.

“It’s a long story—a _really_ long story—, but Michael and I are in love,” Adam says, taking in, in their second hug, his mother’s perfume, the feeling of her hair against the side of his face, the feeling of her favorite around-the-house shawl. He’d forgotten she’d worn those.

“Michael the—”

“Archangel. Nice to finally meet you, Kate. Your son is a bright light upon the infinite terror and suffering of this world.” Adam buries his face in his mom’s shoulder and laughs himself to tears before pulling away.

Kate looks between her son and Michael and back again before finally holding an (only slightly shaky, she’s very proud to note) hand out to Michael. Michael, hesitating first, slots some of his grace between her fingers like a handshake. Kate is surprised by how soothing it is. “It’s…nice to meet you too, Michael.” She lowers her hand. “Adam, honey, I hope you know I’m well beyond lost right now.”

“I know, Mom.” Adam’s eyes catch on the mug of hot chocolate on the counter, and his soul lights up with joy at the sight of the mini marshmallows. “Michael’s got some stuff he’s gotta take care of—why don’t I tell you everything over hot chocolate while he’s gone?”

“Oh, Adam,” she says, tearing up, “I’ll make you a cup.”

“See you later, love!” Adam calls, and tendrils of light swirl around his body and caress his cheeks before Michael disappears, replacing the walls and roofs of Kate’s heaven house as he goes.

“ _Michael the archangel?_ ” Kate demands, tearing open another packet of hot chocolate.

Michael the archangel settles himself far away from Kate Milligan’s heaven and taps into the thoughts of every angel in heaven for the first time in 1000 years. There are no other archangels to detect him this time, and he easily identifies the train of thought and location of one Ariel, former right-hand of the angel Zachariah. At the thought of Adam’s organs bruised and ruptured and Adam coughing up blood, Michael feels his grace start to rip along the edges, little starts of fission in heaven’s most deadly weapon. His many sets of wings flex up, the rings that make up something like his body quicken in their routine spinning, ready to dart faster than any other angel could hope to match. He takes a moment, calms himself down, remembering the breathing exercises Adam had taught him that didn’t quite translate but were helpful nonetheless. It would be better not to be on the offensive—not right away.

“ _Ariel_ ,” he tells the angel within their mind, “ _I have returned to heaven, and I request your presence at my side._ ” Ariel, obedient as they were back when Adam had become Michael’s vessel but without a trace of compassion or self-preservation, appears next to Michael as soon as he has uttered the request. Michael’s grace begins to rip along the edges again.

“Michael!” Ariel says reverently, “I am eager to serve you once more.”

“That is precisely your problem,” Michael says, and with one strike, a knife-sharp wall of his grace slices forth and butchers all of Ariel’s wings from their grace.

This surge of power and the wails of the now prostrate and unstable Ariel are enough to draw the attention of every angel in heaven (and one rapidly paling seraph on Earth), but Michael calls out to them, just for effect, “ _You will appear before me or I shall find and slaughter you wherever you choose to_ try _to hide your pathetic selves!_ ”

And the whole host of heaven (minus a few who flit away and whom Michael finds and slaughters with hardly a thought or movement)—those the Winchesters hadn’t killed in their free will crusade—appear before the last living archangel. Billions of strange, unblinking eyes peer at Ariel. “Who among you would like to tell me the reason not a single one of you came to retrieve me or my vessel from hell?” Michael asks over Ariel’s wails.

No one speaks. Michael slices one of the more trembly angels surrounding him in half. “I ask you once more!” Michael demands, and this time an older, tired looking angel near the back speaks up.

“It was not within the divine plan, Michael.”

“The divine plan,” Michael spits, and because he respects the angel’s courage to speak, he only rips out a few of the angel’s rings. More wails start to fill the clearing in heaven Michael had set aside for this purpose, and he watches with satisfaction as some of the angels less accustomed to combat start to vibrate and destabilize, feeling the pain of their felled siblings. Michael will not kill any of _these_ , he decides. “You would abandon me, your leader for millennia, for _the divine plan?_ Worshipping god is a futile endeavor. You think he would save you, hear you, _care about_ one miserable speck of your being when he would not do the same for me—his oldest, most dutiful son? He will not save you!” The ripping at the edges of his grace cascades inwards, Michael’s rings parting to reveal rotating spikes, his wings spreading, eyes sharpening, glow reaching out to brush at the edges of some nearby personal heavens, “ _Nothing_ will save you from _me!_ ”

Shards of Michael’s grace shoot out from all sides of his being—numerous, infinite, but precise. He grabs bundles of wings and rips downward like flaying skin; pierces into the eyes of his siblings thousands and thousands of needle-like points; bisects massive, gyrating rings with single, uniform chops; encompasses masses of his siblings’ light and turns it dull and useless; snaps the necks of heads they’ve chosen or been granted for their forms. Some surge up against him to try to fight back, occasionally nicking him or gashing a wing. These Michael kills.

Finally, there are no more of his siblings left to touch, and the segments of Michael’s grace he’d extended spring back into his main ‘body.’ His siblings throb and ache and flicker around him. Michael uses his grand, booming voice again.

“I will not lead you again. Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives, take them with you, and get out of my sight. Except you, Ariel!” His siblings recovered enough to fly begin to pop to other parts of existence, and Michael kicks Ariel down to Earth the moment he’s done telling them exactly why he hadn’t killed them.

Michael returns to Kate and Adam Milligan.

Kate is gently holding her son’s hand and listening as he gushes to her about Michael. _As in the archangel Michael_ , she reminds herself. He’d gotten through telling her about the existence of the supernatural, their death, his revival, the Winchester bloodline, becoming the archangel Michael’s vessel, the Apocalypse, and the Cage a little while ago.

Kate would never have slept with John Winchester if she’d have known, is the only real response she can form to all of this, somewhat hysterically. Something in her 20 Earth years of being a mom is telling her that _If you’re happy, I’m happy_ is somewhere in the realm of a correct response, but ‘your son going to hell for over 1000 years and somewhere along the way falling in love with the being that’s sort of possessing him’ wasn’t in any of the parenting books she’d picked up from Goodwill in the first half of 1990. For what it’s worth, though, Adam’s stories about Michael _are_ helping calm her down about the whole thing.

During a pause in Adam’s speech, Kate cuts in with, “You said…you said angel-vessel relationships aren’t usually like this, right?” Adam shakes his head and takes a bite of the cinnamon sugar pretzel Kate had absentmindedly thought into existence for him—the kind from Target Kate would get for him every once in a while when she had the time and money for it.

“No,” Adam says, “I mean, I told you about Sam, my half-brother, but I don’t think I told you about Castiel. I don’t remember what his vessel’s name was, if I ever knew it, but Castiel was just…there, all the time. Never let the man speak or do anything for himself. Michael and I, well…” Adam gestures at the form his soul is taking for his mother, “this is _our_ body.”

In life, she might still be worried, but in heaven, everything is so soft, and, well, her son is right there in front of her and smiling and stuffing his cheeks with a snack she’d sometimes get him during their scant time together. “Alright, baby, I’m glad you’re happy,” she says, “I love you.”

“Love you too, Mom.”

They sit and talk for a little longer before Adam abruptly stops chewing a bite of his pretzel and smiles to himself. Inside his head, a voice says, _Hi, beloved. Didn’t want to scare your mother_.

“Michael’s back,” Adam tells Kate, and she only briefly has time to consider that Adam never told her what he and Michael were doing in heaven before the walls and roof are off her house again, and she forgets that train of thought in the face of the massive, swirling, powerful _archangel_ there because of her son in particular. Adam is on his feet immediately, and Kate watches as the spitting image of her son’s corporeal body shifts into human-shaped blue-white light, stretching out to reach for parts of Michael’s grace that Kate thinks don’t seem quite the same as when she first saw them.

“ _Michael, you’re hurt,_ ” Adam says to him, radiating worry, and though he tries to transfer energy from his soul over for Michael to use to heal himself, Michael gently encases the energy and sends it back.

“ _Don’t exert yourself, my love_ ,” Michael says, “ _this is just a few scrapes for me. I’ll be alright._ ”

“ _You heal_ me _all the time_ ,” Adam says, doing the equivalent of pouting.

“ _Yes, and it doesn’t drain me to do so._ ”

“ _But wouldn’t you even if it did?_ ”

“ _…I hope you know I’m only not responding because I don’t want to lie to you, dearest._ ”

“ _So, please let me?_ ” Adam pushes soul energy towards Michael, who again gently captures it but this time doesn’t immediately send it back.

“ _Fine._ One _smaller wound. But not until we leave your mother._ ”

Satisfied with the compromise, Adam lets Michael send the energy back and then reverts back into his bodily form, turning around to look back at his mother. “Oh, sorry, Mom. We’re used to it just being us.”

“That’s alright, honey,” Kate says, and then she walks forward, steps outside of her heaven house for the first time since she’d arrived for any reason aside from gardening or watching the sunset, and stands before the archangel Michael. “I suppose you and Adam are gonna be leaving soon?”

Michael has the sense to radiate sheepishness. “Yes, but Kate, we’ll come and visit often, after we take care of what we need to.”

Kate nods to herself. “Hold him to that promise, Adam.”

“Oh, Mom, of course!”

Then, Kate Milligan holds both arms out to the archangel Michael. At Michael’s transmission of confusion, she snickers. “You might as well be married to my son,—”

“ _Mom!_ ” Adam calls in the background.

“—and no Milligan escapes a visit with me without a hug.”

Michael, surprised for only a beat, sends two gentle, putty-like projections of grace out towards Kate’s arms, wrapping them around her middle and leaving a pillar of grace for her to wrap her arms around in return. Swaths of grace flow into her soul, sending appreciation, warmth, and gratitude. Kate can’t quite comprehend it yet, but she smiles and feels joyful.

“ _Thank you for protecting my son_ ,” Kate thinks, hard, at Michael, thinking and hoping he’ll hear.

“ _Thank you_ for _your son_ ,” Michael speaks directly into Kate’s mind, withdrawing his grace. He and Adam say their goodbyes and fly from heaven.

**CHAPTER 4: PSEUDO-ROMANTIC AND SICK/LOVE HIM UNTIL YOU BOTH DIE/MAY 27 TH AT 8**

Castiel stands up from the kitchen table and promptly throws up in the kitchen sink. Dean is at his side in a flash, a hand rubbing up and down his back. “Hey, Cas, you okay?” Dean asks, more than a bit frantic ever since Cas told him about AdamMichael’s return.

“No,” Cas says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before filling a glass with water and downing it. “Remind me again what our strongest liquor is.”

Dean pops the fridge open, grabs a bottle of vodka, hands it to Cas. “Is this about Michael?”

“Yes,” Cas says, and downs about half the bottle before speaking again. “He’s in heaven. He was just massacring and otherwise mutilating angels.”

Dean makes a face. “Why the angels? Shouldn’t he be mad at us?”

Cas gives half a shrug. “Well, I know for a fact I was the only angel who ever went down to the Cage after Lucifer and Michael were sealed in it. It’s possible he’s displeased no angels ever came for him.”

“Displeased….” Dean says to himself, half snide. “I guess his brothers left him in hell too.” 

“It would seem that way,” Cas says on a sigh, downing the rest of the vodka.

“Don’t suppose he likes you any better because you _did_ go down there—even if it wasn’t for him?”

“Dean. I called him assbutt and set him on fire.”

“Yeah, you did,” Dean says with a smile. “It was a little off base, but it was very badass.”

“Thank you,” Cas says, deadpan.

Suddenly, there’s a series of loud bangs and a steady but diminished wailing. Dean and Cas spare a look at each other and run into the war room, where someone neither of them remembers having seen before is curled in on themselves on the map table. Dean looks to Cas as if to say, _Cas, what the hell, please explain whatever the fuck is going on to me_.

Cas gets the message, but takes a few steps forward and scans his eyes over the person on the table before asking, “Ariel? What happened to your wings?”

 _Well_ , Dean thinks, _that would explain the lack of flapping_.

Ariel uncurls their vessel a bit and lets out a single bitter laugh. “Michael cut them off,” they say.

“Any guesses as to why he didn’t just kill you?” Dean asks.

“Guessing won’t be necessary,” Ariel says, “he informed me. He said I could keep my wicked life for two reasons.”

And they remember and recount the exact speech Michael had given them, a sharp point of his grace sitting stingingly close against theirs:

 _“I’ve kept you alive for two reasons. The first reason is information. And every time you don’t give me answers, I’m gonna cut something off. And I promise you, they will be things you will miss. I want all the information you have on the Winchesters, because for all of the incompetence I’ve witnessed from the heavenly host, I_ know _you all weren’t dumb enough not to keep tabs on them following my imprisonment. I want to know what they’ve been doing and where I can find them. The second reason I’ve allowed you to keep your wicked life is so that you can tell them in person everything that happened here today. I want them to witness the extent of our mercy by witnessing your deformed grace. I want you to tell them all the information you just told me. I want them to know what I know. I want them_ all _to know, they’ll soon be as dead as the unluckiest angels here today.”_

“God fucking damn it!” Dean yells, storming out of the war room, and Castiel takes the time to roll his eyes before stepping over to his sibling.

“Ariel, I will arrange for one of our siblings to take you back to heaven as soon as I finish talking with Dean.” _Because you can’t fly anymore_ goes unsaid.

Ariel says nothing and grits their vessel’s teeth. Cas goes after Dean.

“Dean, let’s talk about this,” Cas says, tracking Dean down in his favorite corner of the library, bottle of beer in hand and one more sitting out next to him.

“What’s there to talk about, Cas?” Dean yells, “We’re fucked, if it hasn’t hit you yet!” He takes a long series of gulps.

“We don’t know that, Dean. We’ll figure it out—we always do.”

Dean rolls his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I am bullshitting you _every_ time I say that and you know it. And, look, _this time_ Michael’s not gonna spare a single thought about exploding my ass. I don’t matter to him anymore. He’s got Adam now—or whatever’s left of the poor bastard. Even without him, he could fry my eyes out of my head and everyone else’s within a 50-mile radius without even thinking about it!”

“Isn’t that a good sign, then?” Cas asks, “That he hasn’t yet? The Bunker isn’t warded against angels…if Michael really wanted to kill you—or me—, wouldn’t he have done so already?”

“Seems like he’s been busy so far going on his angel massacre.”

“It was hardly a massacre. Michael only killed a few angels out of the many he mutilated.”

“So, what do you think he’s looking to do here, Cas? Ariel _said_ he’s coming to kill us!”

Castiel thinks upon the carnage he’d been tuned into. The screams, the shredded grace, Ariel crying on the map table, robbed of their ability to fly. “I…don’t know,” Cas concedes, which he doesn’t want to admit feels worse to him than knowing for sure that Michael is on the warpath.

“Great!” Dean says, throwing his hands up and swigging more beer. “Too bad we can’t call the guy and ask him what the deal is.”

“Well…” Cas says, “we could.”

“What if we _literally_ just called him?” Dean asks, pacing nervously back and forth between all the angel sigils they’ve drawn on the walls, holy oil in hand.

“Dean, you just told me five minutes ago that you don’t have Adam’s phone number.”

“Phone books!” Dean says aimlessly, as if, one, Adam hadn’t been from another state and gone to hell 10 years ago and, two, as if phone books still existed on a meaningful scale.

“I’m calling Michael, Dean,” Cas says.

“Alright! Alright, fine!” Dean says and brings his pacing to a quick halt as Cas starts to murmur to himself, seeking contact with Michael. Dean’s heel begins to beat a loud, annoying rhythm against the concrete floor, and Cas forcibly halts the movement. Dean would cuss at him for it if they weren’t in the middle of something.

Suddenly, Castiel’s eyes glow a bright white as Michael picks up the communication line, and Dean has to squint and turn his head away at even this small window of Michael’s grace.

“ _Castiel. Dumber every time I see you._ _Was Ariel’s message not clear enough to get through your thick skull?_ ”

“I wanted to hear it from you directly.”

Michael laughs through the connection. “ _Again, stupid._ ” Castiel’s usage of ‘I’ doesn’t tip Michael off from the fact that he’s talking aloud, and the light from Castiel’s eyes spreads out, reaches around, until it finds the other consciousness in the room and drills in. Dean yelps as his eyes glow brightly too, and he hears Michael’s booming voice say, “ _Dean Winchester. Any cordial greetings I’d have for you would be blatant lies._ ”

“Yeah, well, nice to see you too, Mike,” Dean spits. Michael’s grace seems to rumble a bit before something neither Dean nor Castiel can identify swells within it and calms him down.

“ _What do you even want me to say to you?_ ”

If Cas and Dean’s vision wasn’t consumed in the communication channel, they’d spare each other a glance, try to will themselves onto the same page. Castiel starts to speak, but Dean beats him to it.

“I’ll just say this, Mike. You had your fun tearing apart all those angels, but we beat you fair and square back when you went to the Cage, and if you’re one ounce the honorable military man you like to parade yourself around as, that’ll mean something to you.”

Michael says nothing for a moment, then loads the communication line with spears of rage, sending both Dean and Castiel clutching at their heads. “ _Me?_ ” he asks, “ _Just me! You cast Adam aside_ again _, and you act as if you don’t deserve to die!_ ”

“Adam’s _alive?_ ” Dean shouts over the pounding filling his head.

“ _He’s right_ here _,”_ Michael says wickedly, and suddenly, the pain stops and the glow in Dean and Cas’s eyes shifts and switches as Michael figures out a still functional connection with Adam at the forefront. Castiel _sees_ Adam’s soul, unbroken, unhurt, nearly indistinguishably entangled with the archangel Michael’s grace.

“Adam—” Cas starts, surprised.

“Think I was dead?” Adam asks. “Well, I’m not. But if it was up to the sheer amount of neglect and disrespect you’ve had for me over the past 10 years, I damn well would be. Ten _Earth_ years, mind you—as I’m sure you both well know, _for us_ , it was 1200 years, trapped in a cage in the darkest pit of hell. We’ve settled our score up in heaven, and now, we only have three more stops to go. The last ones. _Yours_. And when we arrive at our destinations, we are gonna kill Team Free Will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Songs used for the chapter names:
> 
> CHAPTER 1: HORSES MADE OF STICKS (from “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” by Nancy Sinatra)  
> CHAPTER 2: IT’S LIKE WE KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING OR SOMETHING (from “Lifetime Achievement Award” by Lemon Demon)  
> CHAPTER 3: ABOMINATION/GOD’S CREATION (from “Adam & Steve” by Dorian Electra [I like the R.U.B.Y and Count Baldor remixes for this fic’s vibes])  
> CHAPTER 4: PSEUDO-ROMANTIC AND SICK/LOVE HIM UNTIL YOU BOTH DIE/MAY 27th AT 8 (from “Marvin Hits Trina” from the musical Falsettos [I like the March of the Falsettos version better])


	2. Volume 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adam and Michael get what they deserve.
> 
> Content Warnings Volume 2:  
> • A child witnesses a traumatizing event (chapter 6, last paragraph; however, the child witnesses the aftermath of violence throughout this chapter)  
> • Vivid, continuous torture of (a) main character(s) (chapter 7, from paragraph 6 to section 2, paragraph 11)  
> • Brief but somewhat graphic reference to (hypothetical) eye injury (final chapter, section 2, paragraph 19)

_This time, Adam is very well impressed, even hidden under the grace of the archangel he’s taken to calling his friend._

_“You can’t take him! You can’t take him! He’s mine! He agreed to me! We’ll be here_ forever _together!”_

_“I can and will, Lucifer, and your temper tantrum is only a petty nuisance.”_

_“Death, you are here for Adam Milligan as well, correct? He does not deserve this prison. He was never part of our plan.”_

_“Since when do we get what we_ deserve _, Michael? I don’t hold the scales of justice. I am here on behalf of Dean Winchester, who has instructed me to reunite Sam Winchester’s body and soul as part of our deal. I will interfere no further.”_

 _“No! No! I won’t let you, you can’t, let_ go—”

_There is a horrific, simultaneous rip and scream._

**_KILL TEAM FREE WILL: VOL. 2_ **

**CHAPTER 5: ONE MORE DISASTER I CAN ADD TO MY GENEROUS SUPPLY**

That single pop Death had given Lucifer for interfering with his will had actually messed the Devil up quite badly. Whether that was Death’s intention, neither Adam nor Michael knew.

They’d talked and played games with each other and fallen in love over centuries as Lucifer had sat slumped against the opposite wall of the Cage, near motionless and not saying a word nor using an ounce more grace than he needed to keep himself alive. Adam had thought often about getting closer, about examining the shell of the Devil—pre-med’s instinct—, but Michael had staunchly refused every time he had brought it up. “This is _not_ about control,” Michael had said once when Adam had accused him of just that, “this is about…how I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if something ever happened to you.” Adam hadn’t brought it up again, after that.

Then, one day, there’s a quick shift in the air, and Michael immediately wraps Adam up as tightly as he can in his grace. Lucifer, motionless for centuries, rises, screams for what feels like an age, and then, as if he’d never been more than a common rugaru, burns to nothing. For a while, Michael and Adam are too shocked to even process what they’ve just seen.

Then, Michael screams out, “My brother!” and, still cradling Adam in his grace, surges forward to feel around the space where Lucifer had been for centuries. He searches for traces of his brother’s grace, some sort of clue as to what just happened, but there is nothing. Adam takes the opportunity to wiggle out of Michael’s hold and follow him to the end of the Cage he’s never been to before. He doesn’t see or sense anything either, but it _is_ nice to explore and investigate.

Michael not even noticing that Adam is now beside him concerns Adam, so he nudges at Michael’s grace with his soul, wrapping himself around a ring he can reach with a wave of soft thoughts and soothing. “Michael?” he asks softly and notices that some of Michael’s many eyes have closed or started to blink. Adam gets the sense that it’s the grace equivalent of crying.

“My brother,” Michael says again, miserably, to himself. He reaches a tendril of grace out to wrap around Adam’s soul in return.

Adam is at the same time trying to remember and teach Michael rock paper scissors when Michael snaps them out of Adam’s headspace, drawing his grace up to shield Adam and swarm the boundaries of the Cage in order to better stare down the demon who’s appeared outside its walls. “Leave this place, vermin,” Michael booms, and the demon curls inward just briefly, just for a moment, as if, even with Michael in the Cage, it hurts just a bit.

“Is Lucifer…gone?” the demon asks, and Michael throws parts of himself against the wall of the Cage.

“What is the meaning of this?” he yells.

“I believe I vanished him. I didn’t think it would work, but I’d heard rumors. From my legions.”

“Rumors?” Michael fumes.

“Yes. Something about Death, screaming, Sam Winchester’s soul. That last one’s not a rumor, though—I’ve seen the Moose back from the dead with my own eyes. And I don’t mean the creepy soulless version Feathers drudged up. I figured with all this coming and going and soul-pulling and archangel-disturbing in _my_ kingdom, I ought to at least try to find a way to ensure…well, peace isn’t the right word for hell, but you get the idea. I figured mashing together a bunch of killing spells would do more or less nothing, but…with Death weakening Lucifer, here we are, I suppose.”

“ _You_ killed my brother!” Michael roars, rumbling against the Cage.

“Oh, please. I pulled the plug on his life support, if anything. Anyway, Mike, toodles,” and Crowley pops back to his throne, followed by the sound of Michael screeching loud enough for all of hell to hear. Adam’s soul bobs underneath the force of Michael’s manifest rage, not hurt, never hurt, but just jostled.

The first thing Michael says after calming down enough to settle as much as he can into Adam’s embrace: “Without my brother here, I promise they’ll come for us, kid.”

The first thing Adam says after Michael calms down enough to settle as much as he can into his embrace: “Hate to tell you this, but you’re not very good at promises, love.”

“You’re telling me he cut his way through the entire heavenly host?” Bobby asks, phone tucked between his ear and shoulder as he pulls out any book in his library he thinks might have even the faintest chance of getting them out of this mess.

“From what I comprehended, he only killed—”

“Yeah, that’s _essentially_ what we’re saying,” Dean says, casting a glare over at Cas. “Anyway, Bobby, we’re calling because Adam’s still in there.”

“The poor son of a bitch didn’t die down there, that long in the Cage? What, is he fucked up in the head beyond recognition or something?” Bobby goes leafing through his books for sections on vessels.

“No, that’s the thing, Bobby, he’s—…we talked to him.”

Bobby’s fingers still. “You…talked to him?”

“He’s just as down to gank us as Michael is. In fact, it…almost sounded like it was his idea. The two of them—they switch. Michael let him talk.”

“To me, that might be worse,” Bobby says with a sigh, and he hesitates for a second before grabbing his book on Cupids, love potions, and spells of amour off the shelf.

“Look, the important part is that Michael—Adam—AdamMichael, whatever, are coming to kill us. And if we don’t come up with something, quick, on how to deal with this, I don’t think we’re making it out of this one.”

Bobby sets his face into a frown, circles some spells and sigils in pencil despite himself. “Whatever way you wanna slice it, Dean, we failed that boy. He deserves his revenge, and…we deserve to die.” Bobby pauses, stars a sigil. “But, then again, he probably does too, at this point. So, I guess we’ll just see, won’t we?”

Dean raises his eyebrows at Cas in a ‘Can you believe this?’ type gesture, “So, what, you’re just gonna lay down and die for a bad Venom knockoff?”

“No, I’ll give ‘em hell,” Bobby says, “but I don’t dodge guilt, Dean, and I don’t skinflint my way out of paying my comeuppance.”

“Bobby, you can’t be serious.”

“Serious as a heart attack. Now, you two think long and hard about what you’re gonna say to him— _them_ when they get there. And don’t forget to try calling Sam again. Tell him…well, tell him to put up defenses against more than just angels, just in case my intuition ain’t just an old man losing his mind….”

“Bobby?” Dean says, “Hey, Bobby!” but Bobby has already hung up.

“Don’t call him back, Dean,” Cas says, “he’s right, we should try getting in touch with Sam again.”

Dean sighs, mutters to himself, pulls up Sam in his contacts and clicks call. The phone rings once…twice….

**CHAPTER 6: THE ASTEROID THAT’S OVERDUE**

Michael deposits them right across the street from Sam Winchester’s front door, freshly healed wings flexing to absorb the impact of touching ground and then vanishing as he tosses control back over to Adam. Adam brushes off their jacket, looks both ways, and crosses the street in a slow, calm stride.

He glances around at the perfect picture of suburbia Sam has crafted for himself: the fence around the backyard is clean and even, all of the upper-middle-class-reading toys outside are scattered in only the slightest bit of disarray, there’s a bold print ‘W’ on the front of the mailbox, and the dog who runs over to peer at them through the gaps in the fence doesn’t even bark, standing nonetheless stock-still at the energy radiating off the archangel Michael. “Hi, puppy,” Adam says, reaches out a hand. The dog backs away, ears flat to her skull. Unruffled, Adam pulls his hand back, rolls his shoulders, walks up and rings Sam’s doorbell.

“Mark!” Sam says as he starts to open the door, “I can’t believe you’re early—”

Adam punches him. Sam wheels back on him, hunter instincts still in force, but Adam slides to the side and kicks him square in the side of the knee, knocking him off balance enough that he can smash his elbow down onto Sam’s back and send him to the ground. On his way down, Sam punches Adam’s ankle bone hard, and Adam yelps and lifts his foot up into the air before sending it towards Sam in a kick. Sam, breathing hard, catches Adam’s foot and yells, “Woah, woah! Hey! Hey! Let’s talk about this!”

Adam lowers himself down into a squat. Michael is swirling around right on the edge of his consciousness, furious about Adam being hurt. His eyes glow, just faintly, as he stares at Sam, and little crackles of electricity spark occasionally in the air and make Sam’s hair stand up. “What’s there to talk about?” Adam asks, and he pulls a small, thin knife out of the holster hidden under his sleeve and stabs Sam directly in the shoulder.

Sam screams and lets go of Adam’s foot, quickly veering back to grab something off the living room table. It’s holy oil, Adam realizes as it spills all down his front, and he only has a moment to be afraid for Michael before Sam has thrown a match at them, and…it only hurts.

It feels like any other burn Adam might have gotten in his fully human life, but Michael nonetheless rages and roars inside his head, causes his eyes to glow brighter blue, charges the air even more. “I don’t understand,” Sam says blankly, panting, pale in the face, a ring of blood spreading across the flannel around his left shoulder. “Adam?” he asks softly, no matter the glow and sparks.

“Not just,” Adam says, and as he draws a gun out of the holster on his hip, a school bus rolls up right in front of Sam’s house, stops, and lets a kid off. Sam and Adam, in unison, turn their heads to look out the window, then turn their heads back to look at each other. The sparks around Adam stop and the glow in his eyes fades to be barely noticeable, Michael still very much on edge. In a mutual gesture, Adam holsters his gun and Sam caps the holy oil and sets it back on the table.

Dean Winchester II, six years old, born 700 years into Adam and Michael’s stay in hell, opens the door to find his father and half uncle halfway on the way to one of them killing the other. “Daddy?” he asks.

“Hey, Deanie!” Sam says, trying to angle his bloody shoulder away from him, “How was school?”

“Did…did something happen in here?” Dean II asks, taking a step farther inside.

“Oh, yes,” Sam starts, and Michael sends Adam amusement over whatever absurd lie Sam is gonna have to come up with. “Daddy…fell, while lighting a candle.”

“But…where’s the candle?”

“Deanie, I’ve gotta clean up all this oil, okay? We don’t want you to burn yourself.”

Dean II casts his eyes over to AdamMichael. “Who are you?” he asks.

Before Adam can think to answer, Sam says, “This is an old friend of Daddy’s. I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“Hi, Dean,” Adam says, “you can call me Adam. Or Michael.” Sam casts a worried glance over at them.

“Is that your middle name?” Dean II asks, “I go by my middle name sometimes, since I have the same name as my uncle.”

“Something like that,” Adam says, and his eyes flash quick. Dean II takes a step back: he’s a bit afraid but not quite sure he saw what he thought he did. “ _Scaring a kid, real classy of us_ ,” Adam thinks.

“ _Is it a problem?_ ” Michael asks.

Adam makes a noncommittal mental gesture. “ _No_.”

Sam walks over and kneels next to Dean II. His eyes catch on the knife in Sam’s shoulder, but now he’s not in the habit of fully believing his eyes. “Now, Deanie, me and Adam have some grownup things to talk about. Why don’t you go up to your room and play? Get your headphones out and listen to some music or watch TV if you want. Okay?”

Dean II looks over to AdamMichael. They flash their eyes at him again. “O-okay,” he says and goes running up the stairs.

Sam stands back to his full height, sighs, runs his hands over his face, and winces when he jostles the knife in his shoulder.

“You want some coffee or something?”

“Fine,” Adam says, and he follows Sam into the kitchen with the same slow, calm stride he’d walked into the house with.

Knife still in his shoulder, Sam grabs a mug from the pantry. “How do you take your coffee?” he asks.

“I don’t remember,” Adam says with a smile.

“Adam, I am so—”

“Michael’s gonna groan about it, I think, but let’s go with a _generous_ amount of milk and sugar.” Michael does, in fact, groan about it. Not that Sam can tell.

Sam stares at him strangely, reaches into the fridge to grab a carton of oat milk. “So, did you two…are you…the same?”

Adam stands there, ponders the answer, then throws control over to Michael. “No,” Michael says, flashes his eyes, and suddenly, memories of the Cage are the only thing Sam’s brain has room for. He falls to the floor, twitches, jerks, and screams before Michael pulls away from Sam’s mind and throws control back over to Adam. Sam pants on the floor for a while, and Adam watches, face stony.

“Listen, motherfuckers,” Sam says, still on the floor, “don’t start anymore shit while my son is here. If you don’t want to hear any apologies from me, that’s fine, but leave him out of it.”

As Sam rises to his feet again, Adam tears off a wad of paper towels and dabs at the front of his jacket. “I have no desire to kill you in front of Dean Winchester II. Dean Winchester I, on the other hand….”

“That’s a lot more rational than I’d thought you’d be, being in the Cage for so long.”

“Firstly, _my_ Cage mate,” Adam’s eyes flash again, “was a lot kinder to me than yours. Secondly, it’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack, not rationality.”

“Look,” Sam says, going through the motions now of making Adam coffee, “I know we fucked up, leaving you in the Cage. We fucked up really bad, and I wish we hadn’t, but we did. You have every right to wanna get even.”

“No,” Adam says, shaking his head with a small laugh. “Get even? Even Steven? We would have to send you back to the Cage, let you rot there for another 1000 years, and make you watch as time and time again the people who proclaimed themselves ‘your family’ and swore to help you out and protect you passed up every opportunity to save you— _forgot about you_ , if what Michael’s telling me is true, which I have complete faith it is. _That_ would be even, Sam. That’d be about square.” Adam draws three sides of a square in the air with his index finger.

Sam roughly pulls the coffee pot he’d had sitting out out of the machine and opens the pantry to grab some sugar. “Look, if I could go back in time—if me, Dean, _and_ Cas could go back in time—and fight harder to get you out, we would, but we can’t. All I can tell you is that we know better now.”

“Ohhh, great. I don’t care.”

Sam places a mug down in front of Adam, and he raises it up to his lips to drink. It’s alright. Adam thinks, probably, in his fully human life, he hadn’t liked coffee very much.

“I know I don’t deserve your mercy or your forgiveness, but I am _begging you_ for both, Adam, on behalf of my son.” Adam laughs midway through a sip and chokes for a half a second before Michael clears his airways.

“Sam,” Adam says, grinning as Sam’s eyes widen when coffee vanishes effortlessly off his upper lip, “just because I don’t wanna murder you in front of your child doesn’t mean that parading him around in front of me is gonna inspire sympathy. You have unfinished business with us, and not a goddamn fucking thing you’ve done in the past 10 Earth years— _including_ knocking someone up—is gonna change that.”

“So when do we do this?” Sam asks, subconsciously posturing in that way he’s learned throughout his life usually gets people to back off, straightening out to his full height.

“I don’t know. When do you wanna die, Sam? Tomorrow? The day after tomorrow?”

Sam leans in. “How about tonight?”

“Great,” Adam says, “where?”

“There’s an abandoned warehouse a few blocks down, hunters go there to talk through hunts sometimes. We meet there at 2:30 AM. Now,” Sam breaks his stance, “I have to fix Dean’s cereal.” And Sam crosses the kitchen again to start doing just that.

“I still don’t get how you got in here,” Sam says, making a move as if to grab something with his left hand, wincing, and using his right instead, “I warded this place against angels after Dean and Cas told me about the Cage.”

“I’d have thought you’d have remembered enough about me to at least know I’m not an angel.”

“But, still, you have the most powerful one in the world…what, co-inhabiting your body? Is that what’s going on here?”

“Something like that,” Adam says as Michael sends waves of affection his way. He shrugs. “We’re not…I mean, we’re distinct people, but I think, probably, we’ve blended together a bit over the years.” “ _Carnality aside_ ,” Michael adds. Adam laughs, loud and unabashed. He’s sure he looks crazy to Sam, and he couldn’t give less of a damn.

“Well then,” Sam says, “this is either gonna bite me in the ass or buy me a little time.”

Sam slaps his palm onto the angel banishing sigil he’d furtively drawn to the side of the coffee maker with the blood from his shoulder. AdamMichael just wobble with the force of it.

“Fuck!” Sam shouts, and as he starts to dig through a drawer for a knife, Adam whips his gun out from its holster and shoots him somewhere a bit to the right of his heart.

Adam steps over Sam’s limbs and leans over him, staring him directly in the face as he coughs and pants and splutters blood. “One thousand two hundred _years_ in the Cage, Sam,” Adam says, “and you all _left me there_ ,” there’s a loud crack as Adam’s fist breaks Sam’s nose, “Cas even _saw me there_ ,” punch, “when he came to get you and fucked that up,” punch, “ _forgot about me_ ,” Adam pulls the knife out of Sam’s shoulder with a jagged yank, “never spared more than a _second_ of thought for how you could have saved me!” He stabs the knife down again, right around where he imagines Sam’s heart would be, and Sam gurgles and shakes for a while until he doesn’t move anymore. Adam pulls the knife out, stands up, wipes it off with a kitchen towel.

“ _Check the doorway_ ,” Michael says in a reserved tone. Adam turns around and sees Dean II. For a while, they just stare at each other. Adam regrets, deeply, another child being dragged into the Great Winchester Mess. “I didn’t mean to do this in front of you,” Adam says, fidgeting with the freshly wiped knife, “for that, I’m sorry. But you can take my word for it, your dad had it coming.” Adam rolls his sleeve back, re-sheathes the knife. “When you get older, if you still think I’ve done you wrong, we’ll be waiting.” And Michael flies them away. 

**CHAPTER 7: DAN DON ROSE WAS KINDA NUTS**

Bobby Singer, who had had his own white picket fence life ripped from his fingers by demons, will be harder to trap than Sam was, AdamMichael know. “ _Ringing the doorbell was stylish, but it’ll get us blasted out of this dimension here_ ,” Michael says as he touches them down exactly one half mile from Bobby’s front door. 

“ _I know that_ ,” Adam tells him, picking up the same slow, calm stride as he’d had before. He just killed a man and he’s not even sore. Perks of having a body-sharing archangel boyfriend. “ _This is essentially the Library of Alexandria of the hunting world, or at least it was before Dean and Castiel set up whatever it is they’ve got out there in Kansas._ ”

“ _Sexy little history reference_ ,” Michael says, surges power through Adam’s body from head to toe in a quick little burst, dragging smooth along Adam’s skin as he goes. Adam shudders.

“ _Didn’t even learn that one from you._ ” His soul swats at Michael’s grace, “ _But—and not that I didn’t enjoy it—no more distractions, love. We have business to attend to._ ” Michael sends him a nudge—acknowledgement, love—before going watchful.

AdamMichael walk for a while, silent, focused. When Bobby’s door comes within sight of their human eyes, they stop, gesture and think together, and their body becomes invisible. Adam takes one step, two, then starts into a sprint, Michael making inaudible the thuds of their feet against the ground. Adam hops the stairs two at a time, stops at the top, brings out the gun on his hip holster, and, with just a smidge of help from Michael, kicks the door open.

Only to drop to the ground in some of the most intense pain he’s ever felt in his life upon entering the threshold of Bobby’s home. Out of reflex, his soul reaches out for Michael’s grace, but Michael too, large and powerful as he is, is filled to the brim with pain, shrieking and crying and slamming up against the confines of Adam’s body as he adds to the intensity of their writhing and thrashing. AdamMichael, visible again the moment they stepped through the door, scream, pant, and groan together with two overlapped voices, and Bobby gets up from his chair in the center of the room, slow on his arthritic knees, to stand over them, book in hand. He kicks their gun to the other side of the room.

“Bonnie and Clyde types had to learn that from somewhere, you know,” Bobby says, and his knees pop like old wood panel floors as he kneels down to show AdamMichael, who really cannot focus on anything in front of them at all, a page with an illustration. “I’m nowhere near the first and won’t be the last to have a pair of vengeful lovers come after me. I’m just lucky I got that part right. Lovers like that tend to come back as demons, and well, it seems the spells work even when they aren’t. As long as you’re in this house, the both of you are gonna hurt like a bitch.” 

AdamMichael, still writhing and scorching with pain, spit in Bobby’s face.

Bobby wrinkles up his nose, wipes the spit off with the back of his hand, and returns the gesture with a thick, beer-tinged glob that slops across AdamMichael’s nose and eyes. AdamMichael have the presence of mind to rage for it—Michael, Adam, surging, surging, to defend, to _protect_ , their human, angel, person, love, to _protect_. The spell weighs harder on them as they do—like nerves sliced raw that never calm, instead alighting and alighting again in flame, never even dying like they ought to in the process, a hatchet pushing deeper and deeper into flesh. Bobby flips them onto their stomach with his foot and walks back to his chair. AdamMichael passively hear the faint whir of Bobby’s cellphone’s dial tone before passing out, the both of them, grace and soul—gracesoul—and all.

“Bobby! How’s it hanging?” Kath, the closest hunter down the road, asks.

“Hanging ‘bout the same as it has been since the ‘90s. I’m calling ‘cause I just caught me quite the monster. Think I could use some help. ASAP.”

Sounding noticeably confused, Kath says, “You’re being a lot vaguer than you usually are, Bobby.”

“I’ll owe you a favor,” Bobby says simply, “now, are you in or do I have to call someone else?”

“I’ll come,” Kath says, “I’m expecting a damn good favor now, though.”

“Whatever you’d like. See you in 20.” Bobby hangs up the phone.

“Who the hell is this?” Kath asks as she walks through Bobby’s door, “Shapeshifter? Demon? If I wasn’t in the life, I’d say you kidnapped some kid from the local community college.”

“Angel, actually,” Bobby says, “which I know opens a whole damn new can of worms, but the thing of note is that this one’s got…a strange relationship with his vessel.”

“Is this supposed to mean something to me yet?” Kath asks.

“Forgive me for being rude, but frankly, I don’t care if it does. I just need you to help me carry him into the Panic Room and watch my back in case he wakes up and tries something.”

Kath scuffs her boot on the floor, casts her eyes around looking for what sigil could have possibly knocked an angel out. “If this is an angel, shouldn’t we not be able to get him into the Panic Room anyway?”

“Call it a hunch,” Bobby says. “You grab the feet, I’ll get the head.”

As Bobby and Kath start to pick up AdamMichael, they roust out of sleep and jerk and flash glowing eyes. Kath nearly drops them, but Bobby just holds a knife up to their eyes and shouts, “Hey! One more awry move out of you two, and I’m sending the archangel back to heaven and locking the kid _alone_ in my Panic Room—my _angel-proof_ Panic Room, mind you.”

AdamMichael, wracked from head to toe with anxiety along with pain, now, shake their head as they convulse, chanting low and off-color in their two-tone voice, “No, no….”

“Now, I was gonna undo the Bonnie and Clyde spell once I got you locked up in there, but if you’re gonna act like a horse’s ass, I’m gonna cut _your ass_ to get me the blood I need for the exorcism spell, which I’ve got right in that book, the one with the chunk out of the cover over there on the edge of the table,” Bobby gestures with his head, but AdamMichael couldn’t look if they wanted to, “ _and_ you’re not exactly in tiptop shape. So, I’d say, 80, 90% chance, Mike’s leaving the building. Then, you’re gonna be _alone_ , bleeding, and locked in an iron room.” Bobby moves the knife back a bit. “Now, what’s it gonna be, kid?”

AdamMichael close their eyes and try to still themselves.

“That’s a wise decision,” Bobby says, and he and Kath start up carrying AdamMichael to the Panic Room again. Throwing them in an iron chair, Bobby binds their wrists, legs, and chest with rope and draws circles of salt, holy water, holy oil, and anything else he can think of before setting the oil aflame.

“This is for Sam, you sons of bitches,” Bobby says, walking out of the room with Kath, “whom I’d bet anything you just got through killing before you came here.” He shuts the door. AdamMichael wriggle, convulse, and groan for a little while more before, outside the Panic Room, Bobby wipes his thumb through the sigil that had bound the effects of the lovers’ spell to his home.

AdamMichael breathe heavy, aching in ways Adam hasn’t since before Michael started coinhabiting his body. They sit in silence, restoring their energy and clarity, before, together, they let their grace and soul rush towards each other, checking the other over and doing their best to soothe their burns, aches, knots, and cuts.

“Well, Kath, you want a beer?” Bobby asks, walking over to the kitchen to get himself a bag of chips.

“You know what, why not?” Kath says, and she accepts both the bottle and the chair Bobby hands her to slide across from his recliner. “If I ask questions, are you gonna answer ‘em?”

“Depends on the question, but yeah, probably.”

“I’m just picking together the pieces here. You said we were dealing with an angel, and then, I get here, and you’ve got a love spell sigil dripping down your wall, and there’s only one— _guy_ —here. What that looks like to me—and do correct me if I’m wrong, Bobby—is that you have, locked in your Panic Room, an angel in love with their vessel.”

“Sure do.”

“And you said…Mike.”

Bobby dips his bag of chips in a noncommittal gesture.

“Bobby, do you have _the archangel Michael_ locked in your Panic Room right now?”

Bobby shrugs. “Guilty as charged.”

Kath sits back, takes a sip of her beer, and thinks. “What the hell did you do to piss Michael off?”

“Never tried to save his boyfriend from hell, from what I understand.” Kath gives him a baffled look, and Bobby tells her the story.

By the time she gets herself ready to go, Kath thinks she has the best understanding that she’s gonna get of what happened to lead up to Bobby Singer being on heaven’s most powerful angel and the littlest not-Winchester brother’s shit list. Not only does Kath kind of agree that the Winchesters deserve to die, it sits deeply wrong with her that she just manhandled and helped torture an archangel. She steps down the stairs slowly, pensively, as Bobby walks her out to her car.

As she does, AdamMichael rip the ropes tying them down and think together, merge and separate as needed to see what they can do about the other barriers surrounding them.

“Now, Kath, I mean it about that favor,” Bobby tells her.

“I’m sure you do,” Kath says. She stares at her car for a second, takes a deep breath then turns around, unholsters her gun, and points it at Bobby. “Bobby, I’m real sorry for this, but I’m not gonna be on an archangel’s bad side.”

Bobby, startled, sets himself into a defensive stance, hands held out, glancing half backwards for a way out. He says, “Kath, wait, you don’t have to d—” and Kath lodges a bullet right between his eyes, close range. She wipes blood and slight craniofacial splatter off her face with her sleeve.

Kath steps over the blood and brains to make her way back to the Panic Room but stops dead in her tracks when she sees Adam Milligan, a dual set of knives in each hand, rounding the corner.

“Michael,” she says, hesitating and looking frantically around before ultimately deciding not to get on her knees, “I…I killed Bobby Singer. I was on my way to…to free you.”

Adam loosens his fight stance, has an internal conversation with Michael. He walks forward a few steps, shoes clunking against the floor and leans in an all too fluid movement to the side to peer around Kath and see for himself what’s left of Bobby Singer. “We wanted to do that,” Adam says finally.

“You and Adam Milligan, of course, I’ve heard.” Adam’s gaze on Kath leaves her unsettled. “I’ll make up for it. I’ll be your servant, assistant, whatever you’d like, now, in the near future, beyond that, whatever would….” She feels herself babbling and stops.

“You don’t have a future,” Adam says, and his eyes flash once as Michael steps forward, grabs Kath’s face, and burns her eyes out of her skull. Then, they grab the books Bobby had used to hurt and threaten them—one of which with a chunk out of the cover, they remember—and disintegrate them.

The two of them step over Kath, walk outside, and kick Bobby’s body once for good measure before Michael spreads his wings and snaps them away from Sioux Falls.

**LAST CHAPTER: I TREASURE EVERYTHING THAT WE’VE BECOME**

“ _I’m so sorry, my love_ ,” Michael says, apparition’s hands cradling Adam’s face as they sit crisscross across from each other in their little grove. Michael hasn’t stopped sweeping his grace over Adam’s soul since they left Bobby Singer’s, half in soothing and half in attempts to sear the image of it raw, discolored, and _hurting_ out of his mind.

“ _It wasn’t your fault,_ ” Adam tells him, also cradling Michael’s face. He’s told Michael once or twice so far that ‘he’s alright, really,’ and that Michael can stop the grace treatments if he’d like—as if he hasn’t also been doing some sweeps of his own with his soul, as much as he can reach anyway.

“ _I should have known Bobby would have come up with something specifically for us. We should have lured him out. I never should have taken us inside his home._ ”

“ _You should have known…what, that Bobby would repurpose a love spell against us and it would actually work? You have some other archangel/vessel lovers out there who’ve been hit by the same or similar spells for comparison that I don’t know about?_ ”

“ _Scientist,_ ” Michael mutters, fond and begrudging, flicking Adam on the nose, “ _you’ve…made a point. That I could potentially consider._ ”

Adam rolls his eyes at him. “ _So don’t beat yourself up over it, love. Did it suck? Yes. Are we probably gonna be traumatized because of it? Again, yes. But—and I_ know _this is the hard part—we have to accept that sometimes the other’ll get hurt, and there’s nothing we can do about it._ ”

“ _I hate that with my entire being._ ” Adam snickers at him.

“ _Well, one more stop and then we can rest for a while. How are you feeling about it?_ ”

“ _One more stop unless we somehow find a way to locate my father._ ” Adam smiles at him, proud. “ _Anyway, I’m eager to wipe the smirk off Dean Winchester’s face. Castiel, though…that’ll be interesting. Castiel is perhaps the biggest tragedy my father ever created. He says and probably thinks he’s choosing free will whenever he chooses the Winchesters, but what he chooses more than anything is love._ ”

Adam chuckles and gently pats Michael’s cheek before grabbing Michael’s hands and twining their fingers together, lowering their hands to rest on their laps. “ _Don’t we do the same thing?_ ”

“ _We, at least, admit to it._ ”

Adam unlaces one of their sets of hands. “ _Mind fetching me my notebook, love?_ ” It appears, easily, in his hand, pen he hadn’t asked for alongside it, and Adam crosses off 3. BOBBY SINGER.

“Got any secret affairs to confess to while we’re waiting around on dying?” Dean asks.

Cas flicks him, hard, on the temple. “Ow, Cas!” Dean complains.

“I have hurt you far worse,” Cas says with a slight smile. “And the answer to your question is no.” He pushes himself up against the headboard. “What I _will_ confess to is that I want pancakes again for breakfast this morning.”

“We can do that,” Dean says, making no effort to move. Cas leans over to kiss him on the same temple he’d flicked and slides out from under the covers, grinning at Dean’s wolf whistles as he pulls out clothes for himself.

“Your getting up to join me doesn’t particularly matter to me; however, I _will_ eat all the pancakes if you don’t.” Dean, knowing Cas will, slides out of the bed with a groan, winching a little as his lower back pops not quite right as he slides. He glares at Cas before he even has a chance to say anything; Cas just raises a teasing eyebrow before going back to dressing himself. They’ve given up, at this point, on fretting over AdamMichael’s inevitable visit to the Bunker.

It’s a normal, lazy day for them, and Dean has just wrapped his hand around Cas’s waist to suggest that they go watch a movie together when AdamMichael appear right in front of them and crack their first into Dean and then Castiel’s jaws. Dean stumbles back with a startled and pained yell, and Cas disappears. Adam punches Dean again in the stomach but is met with a hard foot to the shin when he lifts his leg to kick Dean somewhere in the same vicinity. Adam cusses under his breath, off balance now, and uses the opportunity to duck Dean’s punch, promptly falling flat on his ass with the movement. He and Dean stare at each other for a moment, equally surprised, and then Adam rolls to the side in time with Dean aiming a kick at his head.

Adam rolls a few more times, more agile in his 19-year-old’s body than Dean is at 41, and manages to grab Dean’s leg with one of the kicks he sends his way. Adam feels the knife strapped to Dean’s leg under his sweatpants, unbuttons its clasp, and cuts a big gash into Dean’s calf.

Adam takes the opening of Dean cussing and going wobbly on his hurt leg to stand up, and as he does, Castiel appears beside him again, plows him into the opposite wall, and sets the ring of holy oil they’ve had out ever since AdamMichael got out of the Cage alight. Adam huffs a bit but ultimately says nothing, staring out at Dean and Cas as if to say, _Alright, you’ve got me, what now?_

Cas steps over to Dean and heals the wound on his leg before they both turn to face Adam. Dean steps over, bitterly grabs his now bloody knife off the floor that had fallen from Adam’s hand when Cas had attacked him, and re-holsters it. Blood still stains the pants leg Adam had loosely rolled up to take it.

Dean links hands with Cas and starts chanting a spell that Michael recognizes with alarm as Castiel’s eyes glow—the same angelic exorcism spell Bobby had threatened them with, tweaked a bit so that the presence of an angel can substitute some ingredients. Michael nudges for control and Adam tosses it back to him. Michael quickly erases Dean’s mouth from existence. Dean blinks several times in surprise, holds his hands up to his face, looks in panic from Cas to Michael. “There will be none of that,” Michael says firmly.

“We figured it was worth a try,” Cas says, long-sufferingly, and Dean gestures angrily at him, making a bunch of gibberish sounds with his throat.

“Dean Winchester,” Michael starts, all self-righteous posturing, “will you behave?” While acting like this was merely part of _who he was_ an Earth decade ago, he takes pleasure, now, in just being a pompous dick for the sake of pissing off Dean Winchester.

If Dean could scowl, he would. He nods. Michael reinstates his mouth. “You have 10 minutes, at most, before Adam and I get out of this, you know,” Michael says.

“Better than none,” Dean says. “Let me talk to Adam.” Michael rolls his eyes and converses a bit with Adam internally before switching over.

“I was the one who stabbed your ass,” Adam says, “I don’t know why you want to talk to me.”

And, yep, that explains why Dean’s eyes are still in his head. “I want to talk to you because…because you’re my brother, Adam.” Adam gasps at the absolute _audacity_ of it, but Dean just keeps on, “I know that we did you wrong, and I am _sorry_ for that. If you wanna punch me, kick me, hell, haul my ass to therapy with you, I’ll go willingly, and I’ve never been to a therapist in my life.”

“That shows!” Adam yells, still astonished that Dean is taking the family angle _yet again_.

“You just…you don’t have to choose this, Adam—this, this murder spree or whatever the hell you see it as. We can undo it, even. Get Cas to bring Sam and Bobby back. Because the Adam that I knew—”

“The Adam that _you knew_ got locked in a cage in the lowest tier of hell for over 1000 years. And if you’re insinuating what I think you are about Michael, I’m going to make it my mission to crush both of your eyeballs underneath my shoe.”

“And what am I insinuating about Michael?”

“That I have Stockholm Syndrome or something? That it wasn’t him keeping me safe and sane that entire time we were in hell together? That he didn’t listen to me cry when Castiel—” a cruel glance over in his direction “—came by for Sam but not me? That we don’t share our body? That I can’t punch people when I wanna punch people and he doesn’t then,” he holds up an unmarred fist, “heal away every cut and bruise? What _are_ you insinuating, Dean?”

“Fucking damn it, Adam, I’m not insinuating anything! _The point is_ that you’re not a murderer! You were locked in the Cage for a long fucking time, I get that, but Michael is—” and Dean stops, because it hits him, his brain catching up with the unbruised fist Adam is showing him, that what Michael _is_ is in the same room as him, in the same body as his little half-brother, sharing control of that body with him, healing him, protecting him, loving him. And doing it all far better than Dean ever has or ever could.

“Michael is,” Adam agrees. Dean frowns, places the heel of his palm against his mouth, and turns a bit away like he can’t look at Adam anymore. “Castiel,” Adam says, “Michael wants to talk to you.” Their eyes flash, and they’re Michael again.

Michael and Cas stare at each other for a beat, Michael’s gaze steely and framed by flame. “For the record,” Cas says, “I do regret…not concerning myself with the fact that Adam was also in the Cage—when I came for Sam.”

“That means dick to me, as my beloved says.” Dean and Cas glance at each other, Dean curling his lips inward in a desperate attempt not to burst into hysterics. “I want to speak to you before we kill you because I find it appropriate to inform you that, fundamentally, I respect you.” Another longer glance between Dean and Castiel. “I didn’t at first, but I now realize the value in choosing paths that weren’t set out for you—in choosing love. It was not only brave but noble what you did leading up to the Apocalypse that wasn’t: defying orders, helping the Winchesters, fighting, purportedly, in the name of free will, but I think we all know by now that it was really in the name of love. And I respect you for all of this, but I will not forgive you. I won’t forgive you on behalf of my love, trapped body and soul in the crushing force of the Cage, built for a creature older and more powerful than _you_ , little brother. And I think you should understand that much.”

“I do,” Castiel admits. “Thank you for your words.”

“Seriously, Cas?” Dean asks, “You’re gonna thank him for monologuing before killing you?”

“That’s not the way I would put it, but—” Cas starts, but before he can really answer, Michael tilts his head, listening to a specific frequency, and spreads his wings. Cas catches sight of them and stops talking.

“Looks like you got four minutes,” Michael says, and with one great flap of his wings, he blacks out the ring of holy fire along with every light in the Bunker. There is one more flash in the dark—Michael switching to Adam—before total darkness. Dean tries to stay close to Cas, with his extra-human night vision, but Adam plows into him and sends him across the room. Cas splashes him with holy oil, and this time, Adam grins when the match hits him, just singing his jacket, only hurting like a touch to a hot stove. Cas stares at him, astonished but not necessarily surprised—not really. Michael starts to rumble under Adam’s skin, the dead and damaged skin where the oil and match hit them translating to breaks in the thin barrier Michael is keeping up between his grace and Adam’s soul, between Adam in the driver’s seat versus Michael in the driver’s seat.

“What’re you gonna do to us, Castiel?” Adam asks, still smiling, “Couldn’t even pull Sam out of hell.” As he takes a step closer to Castiel, five shotgun blasts fire into the air, most hitting the wall and one even grazing Cas but one nailing Adam right in the spine. Adam screams and his legs go numb, but before he can fall, a swirl of grace pops the bullet out of him and mends nerves and flesh. Michael rumbles angrier and angrier, and the sparks that kick up around their body are strong enough to hiss.

“I’ve learned from my love not to go down without a fight. I think you should understand that much,” Cas says, glancing sadly over to Dean reloading the shotgun.

“I do,” Adam says, teeth gritted. He lunges at Cas, unholstering the knife from his sleeve and stabbing and slashing in any and all ways and directions he can. Dean shoots more, occasionally landing a shot that hurts just briefly like a bitch before Michael takes care of it. Michael roars and paces and jerks now under Adam’s skin and soul, their whole body now glowing and the sparks surrounding them singing Castiel’s skin and clothes. Cas reaches out to grab Adam’s arms to prevent the blows, grabs blade, doesn’t feel it as the knife severs the muscles in his hand. The wound heals before Cas can grab out again, this time smacking leftover blood into Adam’s forearm. Michael surges grace through their arm, and they overpower Castiel, managing to slash again at his face, neck, and chest. The wounds heal back again and heal back again, and Dean continues to shoot bullets into their back, legs, and at one point head, but Adam just wants to cut and hurt and make up for every year he spent in the Cage. Hand cramping, splattered in gore, and satisfied with the look of blood all across Castiel’s features, Adam tosses control back to Michael.

“Goodbye, Castiel,” Michael says, calmly destroying him with only the point of contact of Cas’s hand wrapped around AdamMichael’s arm. Cas’s eyes, open mouth, and nostrils loose the first beams of flame that reach across Cas’s body and grace and burn them both into nothing.

“No! No!” Dean yells and, out of bullets for the gun he’d grabbed out of the hidden nook in the pantry, runs over and pistol whips the archangel Michael in the back of the head. The gun just clangs hard against his head, and Michael turns around slowly to glare at Dean. Tears streaking his cheeks, Dean steps forward and smacks Michael with the gun again, this time in the ribs, because, like Cas had said, he’d never go down without a fight.

“That’s enough of that,” Michael says, and without even a motion, Dean’s gun along with the knife strapped to his leg go flying off to stick like they were glued to the ceiling. “All yours, now,” Michael says out loud, and his eyes flash for the last time Dean will ever see.

“Adam—” Dean says, starting to plead one last time, but he knows there’s really nothing left for him to say even before Adam cuts him off.

“I could break every bone in your face,” Adam says, just staring him down, “hell, I could break every bone in your _body_ , and it would pale in comparison to the number of years I spent in the Cage.” Adam takes one long stride forward, stares Dean directly in his panicked, wide eyes, fists a hand in his shirt for leverage, and slits his throat.

Adam lets Dean drop to the floor, gurgling and shooting blood everywhere. Grace runs over the muscles he had been clenching hard in his hands and arms. Adam sends a nudge of love back, holsters his knife, and wipes his hands on his pants in a very reflexive, human-like gesture. He watches Dean with grace-enhanced night vision until the gurgling stops and the blood, while still running out of the gash on Dean’s throat onto the floor, is not as forceful. Adam’s hard breathing makes up the only sound filling the space in the Bunker.

AdamMichael drop to their knees on the floor then lay flat on their back and cry; after a minute or two, the tears turn into joyous, triumphant laughter. Around them in the Bunker, glass shatters, steel and iron melt, and antiques crack and burn—the map table becomes a molten mess of dye and metal. Adam stands up again, gazes out at the pile of ash and corpse of Castiel and Dean Winchester.

“ _Love_ ,” Adam thinks to Michael, “ _will you clean me up a bit?_ ”

And Michael does.

**(WATCH THE EARTH RISE)**

Michael’s wings are not wet even approaching 5000 psi in the sea, pushing the liquid weight farther and farther behind them as they zip past shallower-water fish and the occasional coral or rock formation. Adam imagines it feels like sticking your head out the window of a moving car, and so, it does. Michael twists them into places deep sea landers struggle to go and points out all the creatures who are as-yet undiscovered, nameless, living their entire lives without a scrap of sunlight ever having touched their bodies.

“ _They’re so cool, Michael_ ,” Adam says to him, feeling himself get what would be teary-eyed if they weren’t underwater, “ _I wish I could tell my marine bio friends about them_.”

“ _You could always tell your mother._ ”

Adam snorts, purposelessly wiping at his face, “ _She’s not gonna care._ ”

He’ll tell her anyway, and she’ll half-listen while trying to teach Michael how to carve new creations out of bars of soap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The unfortunate implication of this section is that I made Adam into Jersey Shore.
> 
> Hope you all had fun!
> 
> Songs used for the chapter names:
> 
> CHAPTER 5: ONE MORE DISASTER I CAN ADD TO MY GENEROUS SUPPLY (from “No Good Deed” from the musical Wicked)  
> CHAPTER 6: THE ASTEROID THAT’S OVERDUE (from “Our Love is God” from the musical Heathers)  
> CHAPTER 7: DAN DON ROSE WAS KINDA NUTS (from “Waltzing Will Trilogy” by Lavender Country)  
> LAST CHAPTER: I TREASURE EVERYTHING THAT WE’VE BECOME (from “LEFT ARM OF LIFE” by Black Dresses)  
> (WATCH THE EARTH RISE) (from “EARTHRISE” by $waggot)


End file.
